Creepy philosophy

Over at NewAPPS Jon Cogburn says:

I never got that into Radio Head's later stuff or anything else on Pablo Honey (the other songs were actually produced by a person that didn't produce "Creep"), but there's something wrong with you if Creep doesn't give you goose bumps or help you get through a rough night. I mean, it's one of the few archetypal songs for a certain feeling that I associate centrally with philosophy. Novalis said this best (if I remember right Heidegger endorsed it wholeheartedly); philosophy starts with a feeling of homesickness, a feeling that you don't belong here.

(What follows is inspired by, and not meant as a criticism of, the above. I should also note that I'll be out of town for a few days, and unlikely to be able to respond to any comments until I get back.)

Homesickness is feeling that you belong somewhere else, not just that you don't belong here. And "Creep" is also about feeling like a creep, of course, inferior ("I wish I was special, You're so fucking special, But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo"). So this isn't exactly homesickness. It's more like homelessness. A weirdo has no home, no place where he belongs.

Homesickness is more what Van Morrison expresses in "Astral Weeks" ("I ain't nothing but a stranger in this world, I got a home on high"). That might inspire a kind of platonic philosophy (or suicide), but doesn't seem typical of what drives most of us.

The view of Plato and Aristotle that philosophy begins in wonder is something else again. Actually I don't know what they meant (so maybe it isn't something else). Aristotle wanted to understand the world in a seemingly familiar, rational way. Plato seems quite different, and yet (apparently) they belonged to the same world.

Wittgenstein contrasts the attitude toward a miracle and the scientific attitude (in his Lecture on Ethics), with science beginning almost exactly where astonishment ceases. We might regard someone's head's turning into a lion's as a miracle, but once we start investigative surgery we are into the realm of science instead. Science can be done in a spirit of wonder and reverence, but it is an attempt to investigate and understand so: a) it is not reverence alone, and b) it requires that one not be paralyzed by wonder.

And then there's Heidegger:

Das Erstaunen ist als pathos die arche der Philosophie. Das griechische Wort arche muessen wir im vollen Sinne verstehen. Es nennt dasjenige, von woher etwas ausgeht. Aber dieses "von woher" wird im Ausgehen nicht zurueckgelassen, vielmehr wird die arche zu dem, was das Verbum archein sagt, zu solchem, was herrscht. Das pathos des Erstaunens steht nicht einfach so am Beginn der Philosophie wie z. B. der Operation des Chirurgen das Waschen der Haende voraufgeht. Das Erstaunen traegt und durchherrscht die Philosophie.

(Something like this: The feeling of astonishment is the arche of philosophy. We must understand the Greek word arche in its complete sense. It names that whence something emerges. [...] The feeling of astonishment does not simply stand at the beginning of philosophy as, for instance, hand-washing comes before a surgeon's operating. Astonishment carries and pervades philosophy.)

Maverick Philosopher comments:

Heidegger's point is that philosophy's beginning, the pathos of astonishment, is also its principle. As such, it is not something left behind as philosophy progresses, but something that pervades and guides her at every step. This, I would add, is one of the differences between philosophy and (positive) science. The aim of the sciences is to dispel wonder, perplexity, astonishment and replace them with understanding, an understanding that makes possible the prediction and control of that which is understood. Philosophy, by contrast, not only begins in wonder but is sustained by it and never succeeds in dispelling it.

I'm not sure about this. Not as an interpretation of Heidegger but as a matter of fact. Not all science aims to dispel wonder. And I wonder about the claim that philosophy is sustained by wonder. Heidegger's philosophy might be. But how much philosophy in the empiricist tradition, for instance, is like this?

Then there's Wittgenstein's saying that a philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about. This isn't wonder exactly, and Wittgenstein (who I think wanted to revive wonder) wanted to dispel this kind of confusion, not to be pervaded or guided by it.

Astonishment does not lead me to philosophize, at least not directly. The thing that astonishes me most is human life or, to be more accurate, my children. But I have no inclination whatsoever to investigate scientifically or philosophically as a result of this astonishment. I sometimes also have the feeling that I live in paradise, and I can't imagine tackling this intellectually (unless re-reading Father Zosima counts). In case this makes me sound insane let me clarify. What I mean is that I live in a place that is very green (slightly overgrown, in fact), in which wild animals are a frequent sight (every time I see deer I want to take a picture to capture the experience, which is Gollum-like of me), and that this makes me very happy. These feelings don't incline me to religion or prayer. They just make me smile. Or not just that. They also make me curious about reading works by people who have had similar feelings, and think about trying to work out some sort of ethical theory or "philosophy of life" based on the recognition of the importance of stuff like this (roughly speaking, life or (environment + family)). But I can't help feeling that developing a philosophical theory of anything would be the wrong response to the feelings I'm talking about. I don't want to express or articulate these feelings. I want to have them, to live in them as much as possible. And it's not as if I have realized something about nature or my children that other people have not realized about theirs. There isn't any news that I have to share with other people. Although I do think we all tend to forget what matters most to us a lot of the time. It might even be necessary to forget from time to time, to be distracted from paradise. Such distraction seems inevitable, anyway, but I also feel obscurely that it might be needed, too. That the way in to paradise is to return, through the door marked 'Exit.'

What distracts us, for the most part, is people, human affairs. Which might be why hell can seem to be other people. It isn't the people, it's the games they involve us in. (Eat this apple, apply for this position, fill out this form...) I don't see any way to avoid all of these games, but it might help to remember that this is all they are, i.e. human institutions of no cosmic significance even if people die because of them. (What does "cosmic significance" mean though? I don't know. Perhaps something it could make sense to worship. A tree or an animal, perhaps, but certainly nothing institutional or conventional.) Politics is part of this, although bad politics are so bad that good politics might be necessary. Even at best, though, I can't help thinking that politics are a necessary evil.

Philosophy seems to me to come from two sources: idle speculation and a certain sense of impossibility or paradox, to which speculation might lead you. Feeling weird and unspecial has nothing directly to do with these, but the people who don't (feel as though they) fit in are probably more likely to have time to speculate (and to be less caught up in social stuff). Speculation might lead to all kinds of creation but it also seems vain. It is, I think, what a lot of people think philosophy is all about. More powerful, though, is the gravitational pull on the attention of things that seem both necessary and impossible: how can this grey lump be the seat of consciousness?, how can these physical objects have free will?, how could the universe have a beginning and yet how could it not? These questions are not institutionalized. (They don't belong here.) They are not scientific. We only sort of, at best, have any methods for dealing with them. They look like expressions of wonder but they feel like scientific questions. That is, someone might hold a brain and say "So this is the seat of consciousness? Wow!" but that isn't what happens in philosophy. Philosophical questions are not rhetorical. We want answers. But we don't really get any. At most we get candidates for answers, maybe candidates we like very much. But no hands-down winner as long as the question remains within philosophy. The questions of philosophy are weirdos.

Those are not the questions that interest me primarily though. I don't work on metaphysics or epistemology. I'm more interested in the nature of these questions than in the questions themselves. Perhaps because I've learned that staring at them gets you nowhere and hurts (my brain, not my feelings). And because as far as there is any solution to these problems, or a method for solving them, I think it lies somewhere in the Kant-Schopenhauer-(Nietzsche-Heidegger)-Wittgenstein-... tradition, and I'd rather look for it there than try to find it by myself. And because these questions seem like another form of distraction, a human creation irrelevant to the question of how to live. And that's not really a question, of course, but an assignment, and what matters is doing it well, not knowing how to do it. It's a puzzler, though, a bit like being lost or finding oneself in a place with no marked paths. The question is not so much "What the hell am I doing here?" as it is "What the hell am I doing here?" To the extent that you don't simply follow convention there are no rules to tell you what to do. And it is obvious to everyone that simply following conventions is not the best possible response to the assignment. But that's about all that is obvious.

Franzen on Kraus

This is too long for my taste, but it certainly has its moments:

Kraus's Vienna was an in-between case – like Windows Vista.

Our far left may hate religion and think we coddle Israel, our far right may hate illegal immigrants and think we coddle black people, and nobody may know how the economy is supposed to work now that markets have gone global, but the actual substance of our daily lives is total distraction. We can't face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq that wasn't really a problem; we can't even agree on how to keep healthcare costs from devouring the GNP. What we can all agree to do instead is to deliver ourselves to the cool new media and technologies, to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and to let them profit at our expense.  

To me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early and clearly he recognised the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress. A succeeding century of the former, involving scientific advances that would have seemed miraculous not long ago, has resulted in high-resolution smartphone videos of dudes dropping Mentos into litre bottles of Diet Pepsi and shouting "Whoa!" 

Some nice bits of Kraus too:

Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then … There's no scaring them; if a spirit comes along, the word is: we've already got everything we need. Science is set up to guarantee their hermetic isolation from anything from the beyond. This thing that calls itself a world because it can tour itself in fifty days is finished as soon as it can do the math. To look the question "What then?" resolutely in the eye, it still has the confidence to reckon with whatever doesn't add up. And the brain has barely an inkling that the day of the great drought has dawned. Then the last organ falls silent, but the last machine goes on humming, until even it stands still, because its operator has forgotten the Word.

Anscombe and the architectonic good

I'm going to be speaking on this subject soon. Here's a draft of my paper so far.

For the conference I can't make the paper much longer but I'm also interested in developing a longer version, so comments that would require my saying a lot more about this or that are welcome too.

Say what you choose

79. Consider this example. If one says "Moses did not exist", this may mean various things. It may mean: the Israelites did not have a single leader when they withdrew from Egypt——or: their leader was not called Moses——-or there cannot have been anyone who accomplished all that the Bible relates of Moses——or: etc. etc.— We may say, following Russell: the name "Moses" can be defined by means of various descriptions. For example, as "the man who led the Israelites through the wilderness", "the man who lived at that time and place and was then called 'Moses' ", "the man who as a child was taken out of the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter" and so on. And according as we assume one definition or another the proposition "Moses did not exist" acquires a different sense, and so does every other proposition about Moses.—And if we are told "N did not exist", we do ask: "What do you mean? Do you want to say ...... or ...... etc.?"

But when I make a statement about Moses,—am I always ready to substitute some one of these descriptions for "Moses"? I shall perhaps say: By "Moses" I understand the man who did what the Bible relates of Moses, or at any rate a good deal of it. But how much? Have I decided how much must be proved false for me to give up my proposition as false? Has the name "Moses" got a fixed and unequivocal use for me in all possible cases?—Is it not the case that I have, so to speak, a whole series of props in readiness, and am ready to lean on one if another should be taken from under me and vice versa?——Consider another case. When I say "N is dead", then something like the following may hold for the meaning of the name "N": I believe that a human being has lived, whom I (1) have seen in such-and-such places, who (2) looked like this (pictures), (3) has done such-and-such things, and (4) bore the name "N" in social life.—Asked what I understand by "N", I should enumerate all or some of these points, and different ones on different occasions. So my definition of "N" would perhaps be "the man of whom all this is true".—But if some point now proves false?—Shall I be prepared to declare the proposition "N is dead" false—even if it is only something which strikes me as incidental that has turned out false? But where are the bounds of the incidental?—If I had given a definition of the name in such a case, I should now be ready to alter it.

And this can be expressed like this: I use the name "N" without a fixed meaning. (But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that of a table that it stands on four legs instead of three and so sometimes wobbles.)

Should it be said that I am using a word whose meaning I don't know, and so am talking nonsense?—Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the facts. (And when you see them there is a good deal that you will not say.)

(The fluctuation of scientific definitions: what today counts as an observed concomitant of a phenomenon will tomorrow be used to define it.)

What goes for "Moses" here seems also to go for "ethics" in the Lecture on Ethics. The meaning of the term is 'defined' by giving a series of similar expressions, and the bounds of the incidental are unclear. There are differences though: the expressions given in the Lecture on Ethics are all meant to lie atop one another to produce a composite picture, whereas the facts about Moses might produce a composite picture, but they do not necessarily overlap. We have a cluster rather than a stack in this case. And perhaps the bounds of the cluster are even less precise in Moses' case than they are in the case of ethics. But in each case we seem to be dealing with a kind of family resemblance. In each case the words "Moses" and "ethics" are used without a fixed meaning. The same goes for "good," as far as I can see, in Wittgenstein's view.

Should it be said that when we use one of these words we are using a word whose meaning we don't know, and so are talking nonsense? Surely the Lecture on Ethics and the Tractatus are being echoed here. On the one hand, Wittgenstein explicitly invites us to say what we choose (language is, after all, not a cage), whereas before he had called such uses nonsense. But on the other hand, he insists that what we say should not prevent us from seeing the facts. And he adds that if we do see them then we will not say a good deal that we might otherwise have wanted to say:

Sage, was du willst, solange dich das nicht verhindert, zu sehen, wie es sich verhält. (Und wenn du das siehst, wirst du Manches nicht sagen.) 

Should this be translated: "Say what you want, so long as this does not get in the way of your seeing how things are. And when you see this you will not want to say much"? Google translate has: "And if you see that, you will not say much." It seems wrong to take it as saying that there is a lot one could say but that one will choose not to say it. How does Wittgenstein know what others might choose to do? Surely the idea is rather that there is not much to be said, and that if one sees how things are then one will realize this. So Anscombe's "There is a good deal that you will not say" sounds wrong. Hacker and Schulte have "there will be some things that you won't say," and they present this as simply correct (see p. xvi of the fourth edition of the Investigations), but their point is that Anscombe's "good deal" is wrong. I assume they are right about this, but it still makes it sound as though there are things one could say that one will choose not to say. I think these things can only be combinations of words that in fact are meaningless, unhelpful, useless. That is why Wittgenstein is so confident that one who sees things as they are will not want to say them.

If we can say what we choose, what are the options to choose from? There appear to be two kinds of things we might want to say:

a) The concepts we use in ethics, such as 'good', have a family of meanings and so cannot be defined. We use them without being able to say what they mean. So our use of them is nonsense. (Recognizing this is likely to reduce our use of them.)   

b) The concepts we use in ethics, such as 'good', have a family of meanings and so cannot be defined. We use them without being able to say what they mean. But words no more need to have fixed meanings than tables need to stand firmly on the ground. We should note this feature of ethical concepts but not necessarily call them nonsensical. (Recognizing this is likely to make us more self-conscious, or just conscious, when we use them, which in turn is likely to reduce our use of them.)

Wittgenstein talks also about aesthetics here, and in his lectures on that subject he pointed out that words like 'beauty' are very little used, presumably because they aren't useful, when people talk about aesthetic matters. Mostly we use words like 'beautiful' when we don't know what we are talking about, either because we are not experts in the relevant field or because we want to say something generic (or both). If you show off your new house or room or sofa I might say "It's beautiful!" because we aren't engaged in any real critical appraisal. The occasion calls for bullshit, pleasantries, not anything thoughtful (not even thoughtful and perceptive praise--that would be weird in the kind of social situation I'm imagining, a quick house tour before a dinner party, say). 'Good' is like this too.

But Wittgenstein says it doesn't matter if a word lacks a fixed meaning, doesn't he? He certainly seems to say this of the word 'Moses.' So he isn't saying we shouldn't use words like 'good' and 'beautiful'. Right?

Maybe. But here we should consider whether the differences between 'good' and 'Moses' are relevant. The name 'Moses' refers to someone of whom some or all of a set of propositions is true in a straightforward, objective, factual sense. The word 'good' is not like this. What Wittgenstein talks about in the Lecture on Ethics is what we might call the intrinsically good, important, or valuable. Nothing is true of it in a straightforward, factual sense. It is all evaluative. You might think that this fact/value distinction that he uses in the Lecture on Ethics is absent from, and does not belong in, the Investigations, but it is right there, it seems to me, in the contrast between what we might (want to) say and the facts, the way things are, that our words might obscure. Couldn't "how things are" include the evaluative? For instance, couldn't it be a fact that some act was unjust or rude? Yes, I think so. But I don't see how it can be a fact in the same way that something is good or bad. In fact I think "That's good" is precisely the kind of thing one will not say when one sees the facts.

Partly this is obvious: people don't speak like this. We use the word 'good,' of course, but not much when thinking about ethical questions. Typically in ethics the question is "What should I do?" in the context of some dilemma, some situation where several goods or bads are at stake and one cannot (see a way to) avoid all the bads or have all the goods. Perhaps I am thinking about blowing the whistle on my company, which I know to be poisoning rivers or spying on people or lying. If I do I will expose and perhaps help to stop something bad. If I don't, I will get to keep my job and continue to be able to support my family. It is like Sartre's famous dilemma in which a young man must choose between caring for his mother and fighting for his country. Either choice would be good but he can't do both, so either choice is in effect a rejection of a good option, and therefore bad. The question is which is the less bad option. The word 'good' obviously comes in here, it has a place, but the problem is not one of identifying where the good lies. The problem is one of estimating likely outcomes and weighing values. Will my whistle-blowing do any good? Might I get away with it? What matters more: my family or the people harmed by my company? And so on. Facts are relevant, but they only get you so far. In the end you still have a decision to make. A philosophical analysis of 'good' will not make the decision for you. (Solving all the major problems of philosophy really helps us very little, cf. the foreword to the Tractatus).

Why not? Because 'the best thing to do' is not something that we can discover or calculate, but something we must decide or (perhaps better) judge. A philosophical analysis of 'good' might reveal this to us if it helps us to see that 'good' has a family of meanings. Does moral philosophy have any other use? For instance, might it not be helpful to think about an issue from various points of view (the Kantian, the utilitarian, etc.) in order to think it through and gain a fuller understanding of the ethics involved in it? This is the kind of thing people typically do in a course on contemporary moral issues, after all. Are such courses a waste of time? I hope not. But when such courses are taught in the way that I have in mind the philosophical theories are used in an exercise. They are tools, and other tools might be substituted instead. That is, we use theories like utilitarianism to help us think something through. We don't use them to tell us what is right or what to do. And we could think carefully about moral issues without such theories, perhaps with the help of good fiction or actual experience. Not that experience always brings things home or teaches wisdom, but it can. Philosophical theories are only helpful if they direct our attention to real issues, or aspects of real issues, that we might otherwise overlook. To the extent that they abstract from reality, from the facts, from seeing how things are, they will be no use. And the more purely evaluative the concepts involved, the less factual they are, the thinner they are, the less they are likely to help us.        

What about the parenthetical remark at the end? I almost ignored it, but it wouldn't be there if Wittgenstein thought it didn't matter. And in fact it seems to point back to the book's motto: The trouble about progress is that it always looks much greater than it really is. I might put it this way: Progress generally looks much greater than it actually is. In relation to the end of 79, perhaps we could say that when we think we have made progress in discovering the essence of something sometimes all we have done is to change the definition. It is wise not to deceive ourselves about ethics, and one way to avoid such deception is to avoid trying to define terms like 'good'. We don't need to stabilize the wobbly or replace the blurry with the sharp.

Note to self regarding facts and values

I'm re-reading Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy," finding echoes of Wittgenstein. With that in mind it is striking that she refers to 'unjust' as a "mere[ly] factual description" of an act (p. 192 of Human Life, Action and Ethics, p. 41 of Collected Papers Volume III). Of course Wittgenstein might not have divided fact and value in the same way. But he might have. (And both might be wrong. But they might not be.)

Aphorisms

I'm a philosopher so I should have sayings. Here's two:

• The best picture of the human soul is the internet
• Unless you dissolve you are not part of the solution

Something more serious soon.

Dominoes

Thanks to "Wittgenstein Day-by-Day" on Facebook, I came across this from David Pinsent's diary:

‘We always begin by playing proper dominoes, and end by building wonderful systems with the domino-pieces – with ingenious arrangements for knocking them down – also constructed out of domino pieces!’ (Pinsent, p.69).

They would have liked Der Lauf Der Dinge:

More ethics in the Investigations

78. Compare knowing and saying:

               how many feet high Mont Blanc is—

               how the word "game" is used—

               how a clarinet sounds.

If you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.

This refers back to 75-77, so we should have in mind knowing what goodness is, how it appears, but not being able to say what it is. "Good" is like "game," according to Wittgenstein. We know how the word "game" ("good") is used in the sense that we can use it, understand others who use it (usually), and can give examples. But we can't say how it is used in any precise, definite way. We cannot give a definition, an essence, because there isn't one.

(I want to say here that anyone who offers a definition, a theory of goodness or an account in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or a formula or anything like that, is doing something different, playing a different game, from what I do. In some ways it is alike, but in others different. Is the difference essential? I say it is. He might insist otherwise. He might even claim that he has captured the essence of what I do. But the answer depends not on some independent fact but on what I say/know/accept about what I am doing. Is that right?)

Ethics in the Philosophical Investigations

75. What does it mean to know what a game is? What does it mean, to know it and not be able to say it? Is this knowledge somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it were formulated I should be able to recognize it as the expression of my knowledge? Isn't my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds of game; shewing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying that I should scarcely include this or this among games; and so on.

76. If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. The kinship is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference.

77. And if we carry this comparison still further it is clear that the degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends on the latter's degree of vagueness. For imagine having to sketch a sharply defined picture 'corresponding' to a blurred one. In the latter there is a blurred red rectangle: for it you put down a sharply defined one. Of course—several such sharply defined rectangles can be drawn to correspond to the indefinite one.—But if the colours in the original merge without a hint of any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. Anything—and nothing—is right."——And this is the position you are in if you look for definitions corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics or ethics.

In such a difficulty always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good" for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings.

There's a lot here.

For one thing, I think the mention of ethics late in 77 comes as something of a shock, sending you back at least to the beginning of 75 to see what Wittgenstein is talking about. A dialogue seems implicit here, and I wonder what would happen, what might come out, if it were made explicit.

A. What does it mean to know what a game is?

B. Well, for one thing, it means being able to say what a game is, being able to answer the question, "What is a game?"

A. What does it mean, to know it and not be able to say it?

B. Huh? Oh. Well, to be able to identify various games as games, and not to mistakenly call things games that aren't games. Something like that, perhaps.

A. Is this knowledge somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition?

B. It's like it. If someone has knowledge like this then we might use it to draw out a definition from them. We could ask her what the cases all have in common, what would disqualify something from counting, and so on. She might be able to tell us what conditions are necessary and what sufficient for something to count as whatever it is we were talking about. A person who can identify games correctly is like someone who can identify, say, cars correctly, and who does so on the basis of an unformulated definition, or at least has implicit in her know-how a knowledge that such-and-such is the correct definition of a car.

A.  So that if it were formulated I should be able to recognize it as the expression of my knowledge?

B. But in the case we're talking about we have the ability to identify without the ability to formulate a definition. It isn't contingently unformulated in this case. It cannot be formulated. Which I suppose means there is no it there at all. There is only the ability to identify individual cases.

A. Isn't my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds of game; shewing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying that I should scarcely include this or this among games; and so on.

B. That sounds right. There is nothing else to be expressed. Although, of course, the explanations that I could give are not all the explanations that I do give.

A. If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all.

B. Well, if you did not want to draw one at all then of course a drawn one would not be the same as the one that you did not draw! You don't have a boundary in mind. You only have the examples that you produce or could produce, the ability to tell game from non-game but no recipe or formula for telling one from the other.

A. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. The kinship is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference.

B. Yes, O Socrates. Right. We call the same things games and the same things not games, but he has clear lines drawn between the two (is that the idea?) where I have none.

A. And if we carry this comparison still further it is clear that the degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends on the latter's degree of vagueness.

B. I see. So he doesn't have boundary lines as such, just sharp edges to the color patches. And I have blurry edges. And the blurrier they are, the less the two pictures can be alike. (By the way, this is reminding me of a couple of things. One is the opening section of the Investigations, where the shopkeeper follows precise, formula-type rules and the narrator--is that you?--says vaguely that it is in this and similar ways that we operate with language. The other is this passage from Wittgenstein:

In certain periods houses and chests of drawers are bounded with a cornice. Calling attention to boundedness is something desirable. We finish off posts of all kinds with knobs even where this is not demanded by functional considerations. A post must not simply stop. At other times there is a need not to emphasize, but rather artificially to conceal boundedness. An object must fade into its surroundings. In this style the edge of a tablecloth was given lace borders, which were originally nothing more than scallops cut into the cloth, for we did not want it to be sharply bounded. But at other times we give a border its own colour in order to call attention to it.

Is there a connection between this and what you are saying now?)

A. For imagine having to sketch a sharply defined picture 'corresponding' to a blurred one. In the latter there is a blurred red rectangle: for it you put down a sharply defined one. Of course—several such sharply defined rectangles can be drawn to correspond to the indefinite one.—But if the colours in the original merge without a hint of any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one?

B. OK, you're ignoring my parenthetical thoughts? Fair enough. No sharp-edged picture will correspond perfectly to a blurry one, and the blurrier it is, the less the correspondence will be. Agreed.

A. Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. Anything—and nothing—is right."

B. Well that's going a bit far, isn't it? But if there really is no hint of any outline, as you say, then no sharp-edged picture will correspond to it at all in terms of how the outlines match up. The colors might or might not be the same, but if we compare no edge with edge, then, well, there's no comparison.

A. And this is the position you are in if you look for definitions corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics or ethics.

B. Wait---what? Definitions in ethics and aesthetics are hopeless, completely hopeless, none better or worse than any other, because what we aim to define is completely indefinite? Why should I believe that?

A. In such a difficulty always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good" for instance)?

B. I don't remember. From my parents and other grown-ups, I suppose.

A. From what sort of examples?

B. I don't know. From being called a good boy sometimes. From being asked "Is that good?" when eating. That kind of thing.  

A. In what language-games?

B. Different ones. Doing something I was asked or told to do would be called "good." Doing something that's healthy would be too. Food that tastes nice is "good." Food that is healthy is "good." Clothes that fit are "good." Obedience is usually "good." Pleasure is usually "good." Convenience is usually "good." I could go on.

A.  Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings.

B. You mean meanings that are different but related, alike? Like games themselves. So I know what is good but not what good is? That is, I can identify which things are good and which are not, but not because I follow some rule-type formula or recipe? And if anyone comes up with a formula that obtains the same results then he is not doing what I do? The colors might be the same but the outlines are different, as it were. And in fact he won't obtain the same results because what I mean by "good" is completely indefinite. It is not contingent or accidental but necessary, essential to what I do when I call things "good" in aesthetics and ethics that I do not apply any kind of formula. Even if there is a complete overlap between all the music that I call good and all music that is very loud, I still do not mean "very loud" when I say "good." I am expressing approval, but not saying "I approve" (or anything else about myself). The person who applies a formula is doing something else. This is why there is no unformulated definition to try to tease out or discover.